John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

A few weeks ago, I took part in an initiative that Greythorn (Full Disclosure: Greythorn pays to post jobs on our Healthcare IT Central job board) started around the great hashtag #GoesBeyond. Using that hashtag they’re asking people to recognize people in healthcare IT that are doing amazing work. You can read my first #GoesBeyond post that recognized the work of Steve Sisko.

For my next #GoesBeyond post I want to recognize the whole HIMSS Social Media team. Many people don’t realize how much work this team puts in to make HIMSS one of the most social media driven conferences in the world and far and away the most tweeted healthcare conference in the world.

That’s why I’m highlighting the whole HIMSS social media team for #GoesBeyond. I hope many others who read this will take part in the #GoesBeyond effort and highlight other people in the healthcare IT community that deserve recognition. There’s nothing better we can do for the community than to show gratitude for each other.

The HIMSS social media numbers don’t lie. Check out the Twitter activity alone around HIMSS:
While most people are familiar with the @HIMSS account which boasts 74,753 followers (and growing), I’m sure that many don’t realize that the HIMSS LinkedIn group has 166,325 members. These are extraordinary numbers and they don’t happen by happen stance. This kind of growth only comes through consistent focused effort in creating and sharing amazing content and engaging and facilitating the discussion on each platform.

What’s impressive is that it’s not a large team that makes all this stuff happen. Here’s the 4 main team members:

Say what you will about the HIMSS machine, what makes this group of social media ninjas special is that they truly do care about healthcare and want to find the best way to improve healthcare through the use of technology. Each one of them truly is a mission driven individual.

A great example of this is their work creating the official HIMSS16 Hashtag Guide. A lot of social media people could have easily just hopped on some generic hashtags that anyone could have created around the buzzwords at the conference. Those hashtags would end up being as meaningless as the buzzwords themselves. Instead they created hashtags which represent directions we need to head and goals we should achieve.

For example, they used #Engage4Health to represent patient engagement, but that we are engaging patient with a clear purpose. The #HITworks hashtag is another great example where they’re working to extract the clear value that technology can provide healthcare. Of course, the #IHeartHIT hashtag which started last year tells the personal stories of how technology can impact healthcare.

HIMSS is right around the corner. Good luck to this team as they try to curate more tweets than anyone can handle. Not to mention all the new video activity we’re going to see on Periscope and Blab. They’re certainly worthy of the #GoesBeyond hashtag.

About #GoesBeyond
In this series, writers take time thank an individual who #GoesBeyond expectations to make an impact in their community or industry. Read other posts in this series on LinkedIn and Twitter, then write one of your own on your favorite blog, LinkedIn pulse, Medium or other platform. Use #GoesBeyond and @mention the person who has made such a big difference, then copy this paragraph so others know how they can participate, too.

John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

The healthcare IT recruiters at Greythorn (Full Disclosure: Greythorn pays to post jobs on our Healthcare IT Central job board), have started to share stories on a new hashtag called #GoesBeyond. As part of this effort, they’re highlighting people in healthcare IT who go above and beyond and deliver something special. Check out this great #GoesBeyond featuring Regina Holliday to see what I mean. I’m all about the idea of recognizing people who are doing great work and contributing to healthcare IT in a way that goes above and beyond, so I thought I’d join in on the fun.

Over the past couple years I’ve been impressed by the work of Steve Sisko and his efforts to go above and beyond on social media. If you don’t work in the payer world, you might not know the name Steve Sisko, but if you participate in healthcare social media you probably do know Steve’s aliases @HITConfGuy and @ShimCode. Not only is Steve prolific on social media, but the quality of information he provides is off the charts. I’m always amazed how quickly Steve can pull up a high quality resource during Twitter chats or other social media engagements.

As part of Steve’s creation of the @HITConfGuy Twitter account, he also launched the blog HITConfGuy.com. On this blog Steve provides his unique mix of humor and high quality content to both entertain and inform those of us who spend time at healthcare IT conferences. However, I believe that Steve’s posts on HIT Conf Guy are even more valuable to those who don’t spend their time traveling to healthcare IT conferences as part of their career.

Beyond all his work providing tips, tricks, and humor around healthcare IT conferences, Steve has spent countless hours curating what I’d call his list of healthcare IT lists. If you’re looking for who to follow in healthcare social media, his lists can help you. If you want a list of healthcare IT resources, he likely has one. He even put in an extremely large amount of time into filtering through the mass of #HIT99 tweets to create the #HIT99 list.

The most amazing part of all of these efforts by Steve is that he doesn’t get paid anything to do it. Maybe he has some longer term aspiration of making these efforts into a business (I don’t know either way), but to date he’s done all of this to contribute to the healthcare IT community. In fact, I’ve often heard Steve bristle at some of the things that happen on social media that were so revenue driven. Steve really does want to improve healthcare.

That’s why I’m highlighting Steve Sisko for #GoesBeyond. I hope many others who read this will take part in the #GoesBeyond effort and highlight other people in the healthcare IT community that deserve recognition.

About #GoesBeyond
In this series, writers take time thank an individual who #GoesBeyond expectations to make an impact in their community or industry. Read other posts in this series on LinkedIn and Twitter, then write one of your own on your favorite blog, LinkedIn pulse, Medium or other platform. Use #GoesBeyond and @mention the person who has made such a big difference, then copy this paragraph so others know how they can participate, too.